At Wired offices, you hear the question over and over again as we work on stories like the one you’re reading now: “Are you out of the story? I want to go in.” We have a version control problem. We publish Wired.com on WordPress. It’s a decent publishing tool, but when two people change a story at the same time, one of them doesn’t get her changes onto the final story.

We published our GitHub story on GitHub because it was meta-cool. But we also did it to see if GitHub might actually help us solve our problem.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t. GitHub’s great for a lot of things, source code chief among them, but it’s not for the faint of heart. There’s a great deal of command line, and general geekery involved that raise the barriers to entry just high enough to keep it out of everyday newsrooms and editorial workflows. 1

The Pitch:What if we could re-imagine WordPress’s ease-of-use and intuitively dumb-simple workflow to introduce a layer of GitHub’s collaborative fork-and-merge horsepower under the hood?

Users would have the ability to “clone” an existing post, make any changes they want, and then merge those change back into the original before publishing.There are four distinct use cases where this feature may come into play:

Post forking may make for a killer plugin 2 or piece of core functionality… and imagine if it could integrate with other collaboration tools like Edit Flow, or WP Document Revisions? As in Wired’s example, it has the potential to fundamentally change newsrooms and other editorial workflows. All of a sudden, any content becomes either publicly or privately collaborative. Pretty cool, huh? While it may be a bit ahead of it’s time from a human standpoint, from a technical standpoint, the technology’s there — it’s nothing new — just a matter of building it, and hopefully solving the dreaded “are you out yet?” problem.

Update (3/5): The plan right now is to submit this as a Google Summer of Code project, so if all goes well, look for the above-outlined functionality in a WordPress install near you towards the end of the summer. In the mean time, the continued thoughts/feedback is very greatly appreciated.

Full disclosure: two plugins, Revisionary and Duplicate Post exist, but they don’t take the idea nearly as far as the above proposes, nor do they do it in “the WordPress way”. I’d hope that even if the idea started as a plugin, it would eventually be incorporated as core functionality. ↩